This application relates generally to pricing products, and in particular to efficiently pricing products from a plurality of merchants.
Many consumers opt to use online shopping in addition to or in lieu of physically going to a store to buy products. Online shopping allows consumers to conveniently purchase products remotely, which in turn makes it easier to shop around for the lowest prices and purchase products from multiple merchants. Merchant marketplaces facilitate the sale of products by multiple merchants by providing a single place for different merchants to sell their products. Oftentimes, multiple merchants offer the same product but at different prices. In these situations, merchant marketplaces often make the lowest price most prominent.
However, these prices are set generally, not tailored to the consumer that is purchasing the product. Because of this, merchants and/or merchant marketplaces have to make sure that the price they are offering adequately covers known contingencies. For example, if the merchant offers free shipping, they need to make sure that they add enough to the base price of the product to cover the maximum (or in some cases, average) shipping cost. However, even if the actual cost to ship the product to consumer is lower than the shipping cost that is included in the product price, the consumer still pays that amount instead of having those savings passed down to them.